A rare opportunity to see François Pinault’s unparalleled portraiture collection in Los Angeles

Comprised of more than 10,000 works, François Pinault’s contemporary art collection is amongst the world’s finest. While the breadth of the collection can be experienced in European institutions, including the Bourse de Commerce in Paris and the Palazzo Grassi and Punta della Dogana in Venice, art enthusiasts in the United States will soon be able to discover a selection of portraits in Eye Contact: An Invitation to the Pinault Collection.

Highlighting thirteen works by seven artists including Cindy Sherman, Pope.L, and Thomas Houseago, who has additionally contributed seven sculptures from his personal collection, Eye Contact represents a minute portion of the 5,000-plus figurative works in the collection. Each piece featured in Eye Contact — whose theme will be expanded upon in an exhibition at Couvent des Jacobins in Rennes, Brittany, this summer — is a powerhouse, reflecting the collector’s deep passion for portraiture as a powerful means of human connection that transcends language and time.

Since he began collecting in the 1970s, François Pinault, the founder of Kering and owner of Christie’s, has developed a strong association with Los Angeles. In addition to his affinity for contemporary art, Artémis, the holding company of the Pinault family, owns a majority stake in the Creative Artists Agency (CAA), a prominent talent and sports agency based in the city.

In many ways, Eye Contact pays homage to the collector’s strong relationships established with the city’s leading artists from different generations, from Llyn Foulkes to Houseago. Another such artist is Jim Shaw, whose monochromatic painting of the collector, Untitled (Distorted Portrait of FP) (2001), will be exhibited by the Pinault Collection for the first time.

While Shaw’s portrait immortalises Pinault’s visage in the artist’s signature warped style, Houseago’s works capture another side of the collector — his career’s origin story. In addition to a bronze mask, the show will feature a site-specific grouping of Houseago’s Brutalist sculptures on Christie’s terrace. The artist considered it paramount to include a sculpture made of redwood. Prior to building his luxury empire, Pinault established his first business, which specialised in the timber trade, in 1962. Years later, he and Houseago would bond over lengthy discussions about the quality of wood and how to make compelling sculpture with the material.

Houseago’s figures walk the line between symbolism and realism. This grey area is one of the aspects of portraiture that most appeals to Pinault. The portraits in Eye Contact include a mix of actual and invented subjects. The British artist Lynette Yiadom Boakye, for example, paints imagined figures whose own origins are ambiguous, and yet they express universal emotions that make them undeniably gripping.

In the case of Netherlands-based South African artist Marlene Dumas, interpretation adds an intriguing layer to the notion of portraiture. Her source imagery often stems from historic paintings. Her 2013 work Militaristic Monomaniac reimagines French Romantic painter Théodore Géricault’s early 19th-century portrait Man with Delusions of Military Command. The painting is from a radical series depicting the mentally ill. Dumas was commissioned to paint the work when the original could not be displayed alongside the other four at the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt’s 2013-14 retrospective Géricault: Images of Life and Death.

Two of the most complex works in Eye Contact come from Belgian artist Luc Tuymans. The 2018 portraits Anonymous III and IV are based on photos taken by the American photographer Arne Svenson during a five-year journey between the US and Mexico in which he documented forensic facial reconstruction sculptures, typically commissioned by law enforcement agencies to help identify murder victims. Images from the series, entitled Unspeaking Likeness, were distributed in public spaces, leading to the identification of two of the victims. Tuymans’ painterly interpretation of Svenson’s haunting series further muddles the subjects’ identities, raising provocative questions about whether these figures are real or imagined, sculpture or photograph.

In this tightly curated exhibition, the Pinault Collection emphasises that not every portrait should be taken at face value.

In the wake of the Los Angeles wildfires, Christie’s has donated to the California Community Foundation Wildfire Recovery Fund, the Getty’s LA Arts Community Fire Relief Fund, and the Los Angeles Food Bank to aid recovery operations and support the victims.